The ABC News blog The Blotter reports that the ISI did a number on an American news correspondent and her Pakistani photographer sometime recently:

New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall tells ABC News she was assaulted by plain-clothed government security agents while reporting in Quetta, a Pakistani city near the Afghan frontier where NATO suspects the Taliban hides its shadow government.

Akhtar Soomro, a freelance Pakistani photographer working with Gall, was detained for five-and-a-half hours. According to Gall, the agents broke down the door to her hotel room, after she refused to let them enter, and began to seize her notebooks and laptop. When she tried to stop them, she says one of the men punched her twice in the face and head.

“I fell backwards onto a coffee table smashing the crockery,” she recalled in a written account of the incident. “I have heavy bruising on my arms, on my temple and my cheekbone, and swelling on my left eye and a sprained knee.”

Gall says the agents accused her and Soomro of trying to meet the Taliban. They identified themselves as working for Pakistan’s Special Branch, an undercover police department, but Gall said other local reporters identified them as employees from one of the country’s two powerful spy agencies: Inter-Services Intelligence or Military Intelligence.

The Committee to Protect Journalists ranked Pakistan the “third most dangerous” place in the world to work in 2006, after two journalists died in violent circumstances, and more than a dozen others were abducted or assaulted by state authorities.

In its annual report, Reporters without Borders complained that in Pakistan “investigative journalists are constantly targeted by military security services, which have no hesitation in harassing anyone they find troublesome.” It was the first reported incident of Pakistani agents belting a female reporter.

Gall said the Minister of State for Information, Tariq Azeem Khan, apologized for the incident and helped secure the release of the photographer and Gall’s belongings. But she says he told her to inform Pakistani authorities ahead of future visits to Quetta “to avoid such difficulties.”

I will limit my comments, many of which would be obvious anyway. It is worth pointing out however that this incident should remind us that as difficult as it is to be a foreign correspondent in a country where political conditions are dodgy, local freelancers such as Ms. Gall’s photographer are even more exposed. I commend the brother for his courage and I hope he stays safe. Continue reading →

There’s an interesting article in the New York Times by Anand Giridharadas about the way in which the Indian real estate boom has been affecting slums in Mumbai.

As many readers may be aware, Mumbai shantytowns are unusual in that their residents are often effectively permanent, and many people living there actually prefer the chaotic environment to the cramped enclosed spaces that are sometimes made available to them via various housing/resettlement schemes. The old method of clearing slums consisted of mainly bulldozing them and then going away, at which point the former residents would simply come back and rebuild. It was, in effect, both ineffectual and unfair. In recent years, the pace of slum-clearing has quickened, as the government has hopes of “Shanghaization” in support of “Vision Mumbai” (see this Frontline article for more).

But now there is a new method, where private developers are resettling slum dwellers into tower apartments they build and give away for free to residents. In exchange, they get to develop the remainder of the land any way they want: Continue reading →